Seven Songs for the Week #158 - 15th Apr 2026

New Jack White and a pleasant noise. Good organ sound.

Bert Sugarman‘s The Midnight special is slowly being released on YouTube, and we are deep in the throes of 1976 at present. The most recent release featured The Miracles kicking off with the more well-known track Love Machine. This sent me back to listen to it’s parent album where I found this song, a rather laid-back and progressive point of view for the 1970s, considering it was recorded six years after Stonewall. As it turned out, the Miracles also performed this song on the same episode and it’s well worth checking out, because of the extended chatter at the end where there’s a mass shrugging of shoulders about the notion of going to a gay bar and hanging out with a trans woman.

Heard this in the car this week, pleasant.

Meet the new Strokes, same as the old Strokes. Went looking at tickets for their Dublin show today - €140! I don't think so.

Flicking around on the television at the weekend there was a documentary from about 10 years ago on about PiL I didn’t watch the whole thing, but this pleasant song played over the end credits.

We are on the verge of a new TMBG album coming out in two days time. I listened to Factory Showroom this week, and it really is a fantastic record, however, when I first heard it back in 1996 I remember being disappointed. Maybe at that time I’d stopped being a teenager, and I just wasn’t in that They Might Be Giants headspace. If it’s also possible that I was a bit thrown by songs with a regular rock backing band, and lasting for a very reasonable four minutes, which relative to the normal length of a TMBG song, makes this their Prog album. Pet Name was probably the track I disliked most upon the original release, and now it’s my favourite on the record, it’s such a nifty tune and a great bit of composition.

Laufey it’s very good at that thing she does, and she’s only getting bigger and bigger. It’s nice to see GenZ going back to the 1960s.